Optimal Flow Aggregation for Global Energy Savings in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Abstract

Today, regardless of economic or environmental incentives, reducing energy consumption is of great importance when designing IT systems. In a multi-hop wireless network, taking into account energy usually consists in maximizing the lifetime of the network by uniformly distributing the traffic all over the nodes. In this paper, we propose a new routing paradigm which aggregates flows on a minimum number of nodes to maximize the number of nodes that can be turned off in the network. In this way, we intend to significantly reduce global energy consumption. To maintain the same quality of service while keeping the same network capacity, we combine flow aggregation with network coding. Our approach is particularly effective, in part because aggregation increases coding opportunities, as shown in the simulations in terms of global energy savings and network load compared to conventional routing algorithms.